I too still think Precious Moments count as art -- though crappy art

I don't know. Somewhere it's crossed the line into commerce for me. Are the Precious Moments characters create to express something, or to make money? What's the prime Motivation?

Which leads us back to Michael Bay. I'm less and less inclined to call commercial films art. Some filmmakers have an artistic intent or spark, but when the studios, producers and marketers get involved, a film becomes a product, or a commodity. The language of Hollywood is way more about selling and packaging than it is about creating. I'm just not sure where the line is between art and commerce in film. They're all commercial products in a way.

Heh, but you're probably not going to get much empathy from/with vampires.

Tell that to Spike's fans circa 2002.

I don't know. Somewhere it's crossed the line into commerce for me. Are the Precious Moments characters create to express something, or to make money? What's the prime Motivation?

Well, by that standard, many great painters and composers would not be artists. Or say, anything on Broadway.

Notes: I wish to nibble on Tom's spicy brains.

I'm sitting in Sue and Sophia's corner, unsurprisingly. I haven't gotten very far into this discussion, because while I have definite Opinions, those Opinions are formed by my gut instincts and countless experiences throughout the years, and as such, I'd have a hard time trying to defend those against the sharp-minded people here without getting upset. Totally my issue.

But don't you have to compare the number of artists total to the number of vets or government inspectors or physicians or guards, to draw a conclusion about the percentage of each who commits suicide?

I think so. (A "per-capita" suicide chart. How fucking morbid.)

Anyway, I have no dog in this hunt, but I am suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance that it's David, champion of the plastic and the pre-fab and scourge of that dirty word "authenticity," who is making the more exclusionary argument about who can wear the mantle of the artist. Well, I'm off to go stick a feather in my cap and call it macaroni.

I'm not making an either/or distinction. I'm arguing for a spectrum or scale or axis. Not every bubblegum record is artful, but some are. Where is the threshold? That's why we have the High Hat. This is worthy, this is not.

And Jessica, I'm arguing that aesthetic standards are culturally derived. Which doesn't make them subjective just open to debate and mutable. (I'm pretty sure I've had this argument here before.) There's a venn diagram of overlapping critical assessment that forms those standards. Grandma can yell about Ornette Coleman's music being noise all she wants, and that is her subjective opinion but it does not diminish Ornette's cultural worth. Those standards are neither subjective nor objective. They exist outside of the individual by common agreement.

Nutty, there's far less agreement about what constitutes art than what constitutes a day. See for example: this discussion. So it is not meaningless to argue that not every cultural product is art. This may be a semantic distinction, but it is has plenty of precedent.

Writers and Alcohol (and Madness). It starts with "the link between creativity and alcoholism remains unproven" but does go on to note things like:

Nancy J. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa with a PhD in English, did a 15-year study of 30 creative writers on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where students and faculty have included well-known writers Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor. She found that 30 percent of the writers were alcoholics, compared with 7 percent in the comparison group of nonwriters, she wrote in the October 1987 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

...and

Ronald R. Fieve, in his 1975 book Moodswings, concedes that creative individuals tend to be eccentric and erratic, but he does not agree with the general Freudian idea that creativity is simply a response to emotional pain. That thesis "would say that art is rooted in sickness," he writes. "I would conclude that individuals are creative despite their disorders, but certainly not because of them."

In 1904, Havelock Ellis, who wrote copiously about psychology and sex around the turn of the century, did a study of 1,030 geniuses in England's history and found that only 4.2 percent of them were crazy. That's the same proportion of disturbed people in the general population, according to some estimates.

At the same time, if creativity itself does not cause alcoholism, are there occupational hazards that lead writers to become alcohol abusers?

Perhaps. For one thing, writers usually work alone, facing an empty page that must be filled. There's no camaraderie at work for the fiction writer. He or she must keep at it day after day alone in a room with a keyboard, writer's block and fears of failure to even get published. Then there is the horror of hostile criticism. Virginia Woolf suffered from depression of psychotic intensity after unfavorable criticism. Although she did not turn to alcohol as self-treatment for depression, many writers do. No wonder that Jack London's "pleasant jingle" could become so comforting--and so illusory.

Dr. Anita Stevens, a psychiatrist in New York who is the author of Your Mind Can Cure, treats a number of people in the creative professions. "My writer patients work in isolation, and isolation leads to alcohol," she said. "Anybody can become addicted, but writing seems to lend itself to addiction. Writers' enthusiasm will carry them away into the bottle. Then instead of getting more ideas from alcohol, they find their ambition (continued...)

( continues...) dulled."

So, no proof but some evidence and theories.

Well, it does make it hard to look to your heroes for inspiration: "What Would Chandler Do?: drink his weight in gimlets. I think I'll pass. The voices in my head are down with substance abuse(maybe even fascinated by it--writers ALL love Bubbles, don't we? DS says he identifies with him most of all..so I guess I just said The Wire is art...where was I?) but there are other parts of me that would object.

Hmmm, here's another reviewer looking at Goodwin's book:

In his study Goodwin uncovered medical statistics that show, in the US, writers are more susceptible to alcoholism than virtually any other profession. Goodwin suggests three reasons to explain writers' increased propensity to drink. Firstly: The hours are good - poets and novelists have relative freedom to drink and recover from heavy sessions, unrestricted by strict working hours. Secondly: It is expected - alcoholic writers are curiously indulged, while inebriation in other jobs is unacceptable. Goodwin suggests writers need inspiration - echoing the romantic belief that alcohol can serve as some mysterious creative fuel, invoking a heightened state of consciousness through which to perceive the world.

Also, it occurs to me that my argument re: art and standards is descriptivist rather than prescriptivist. I am describing how cultural value is assigned, not gatekeeping. And I am arguing that that assignation of value is not subjective but arrived at by bullshit consensus. Also that the distinction is widely held leading bookstores to having "Literature" and "Popular Fiction" sections, or tacitly acknowledging (but ignoring) the distinction with B&N's "Fiction and Literature" section.

As for the High Art/Low Art debate, I think that is a debate traditionally bound by the choice of medium. Novel and poetry and opera can be art; comics and stand-up comedy and hip hop are not. Obviously, I think the medium does not determine the artfulness of the work.

Here's a study: Verbal creativity, depression and alcoholism.

BACKGROUND. An earlier study of 291 world famous men had shown that only visual artists and creative writers were characterised, in comparison with the general population, by a much higher prevalence of pathological personality traits and alcoholism. Depressive disorders, but not any other psychiatric conditions, had afflicted writers almost twice as often as men with other high creative achievements. The present investigation was undertaken to confirm these findings in a larger and more comprehensive series of writers, and to discover causal factors for confirmed high prevalences of affective conditions and alcoholism in writers. METHOD. Data were collected from post-mortem biographies and, where applicable, translated into DSM diagnoses. The frequencies of various abnormalities and deviations were compared between poets, prose fiction writers, and playwrights. RESULTS. A high prevalence in writers of affective conditions and of alcoholism was confirmed. That of bipolar affective psychoses exceeded population norms in poets, who in spite of this had a lower prevalence of all kinds of affective disorders, of alcoholism, of personality deviations, and related to this, of psychosexual and marital problems, than prose fiction and play writers. CONCLUSIONS. A hypothesis is developed, which links the greater frequency of affective illnesses and alcoholism in playwrights and prose writers, in comparison with poets, to differences in the nature and intensity of their emotional imagination. This hypothesis could be tested by clinical psychologists collaborating with experts in literature on random samples of different kinds of writers.

But then my ideas started percolating again and I was able to address them with more clarity

Speaking from the Bipolar side of the house, getting the proper medication made the world of difference for me. When I was on antidepressants, my words went away. I wanted to write, but couldn't put the thoughts together in a meaningful way or have the energy to actually write. Once I got properly diagnosed and on the right meds for me, they all came back, plus some. My output is greater and, I think, better than it had been. I don't have a clue, though, if anyone would call it art. I just do it because I have to or I get antsy. It sucked being mentally antsy and not being able to write, I don't ever want to go back to that.